From romanticism to post modernism, art is the dominion of the single European or of the Euro-centric, as well as culture and language. In the modernist period, art possesses a manifest (modern) side and a hidden one: the first builds on the new and the urban, utilising the world, while the second highlights the traditional and the national. Post modern art, specifically for the small European cultures (whose numbers are increasingly diminishing), appears with the trans-avant-garde, followed on the one hand by neo-conceptualism and on the other in the supranational. Globalisation is another aspect for defining the multinational hegemony of the capital and in particular of American culture, which is becoming the dominant reality of global culture. "Identity" is both individual and group, but never national; the specific capitalist (American) definition "supranationalist" is de facto becoming universally global.

Artists from minority cultures are often forced into creative and promotional parasitism of larger cultures; their creative works are then placed in their national culture, in their totality. However - as in the past - they retrospectively (assimilated through the national language, the media, etc.) influence the national culture. The present consequence of this assimilation is the paradox that today universalised authentic modernism has become one of the last refuges of national art.

Aleš Erjavec